Getting a mentor is at the heart of succeeding after college. Wrangling a mentor is a major career boosting event. Approaching mentorship is a side passion that has gotten me access at levels higher than I deserve. My wish is to boil down my curation of best mentorship and expose some counterintuitive dynamics into this listicle into “7 Street Smart Ways to Get a Mentor”. I welcome comments and feedback as my ability to place thoughts into written format is a challenge because mentorship is such an emotionally charged topic.

Some common questions I will attempt to solve

How do I get on the calendar of a person who has a super packed schedule

How do you initially meet your mentor?

What role does my non-existent social media presence play in reaching out to someone very influential?

-1- Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

We still use paper letters, paper notes, phones, emails, fax and business cards. Your potential mentor will have a preferred way to speaking with you. Let me stress that all the modes of transportation help get you to your next mentor and your next-next mentor. What I’d like to stress is that your mentor might have the preference to use old fashion smoke signals and we as mentees are going to have to hook up a facsimile machine.

For example, I met my mentor via snail mail. I wrote out a handwritten letter and put it in a #10 envelope.

For example, another mentor Ted Rhingold liked you to like his Twitter likes. And like the tweets that you would like to network with him about. So instead of setting a premeeting agenda via email, you signal an ability to search within a social media feed. You also signal your

This answers the question of, “How do I get on the calendar of a person who has a super packed schedule”

-3- Be the mentee to a cohort mentor.

So your cohorts are a great source of peer mentorship. But because of pride, hubris or/and shyness, we do not thank our lowly cohort mentors publicly.

There are four types of mentors:

– superstar mentor

– cohort mentor

– junior mentor

– default mentor.

People overly stress a superstar mentor which I define as a brand named, industry leader. But a cohort mentor (think peer learning) is a great “hack” to prime the mentor pump. Briefly, a junior mentor is when your mentor learns from you where you’re the junior. Default mentor is a person who is near you that mentors you by default: Think family, an assigned work associate or someone in close proximity that by default fills your head with their opinion(s).

-4- Be the mentee to their mentor.

You should guess at who your potential mentor’s mentor. They have risen to superstar mentor levels because of a mentor. Very often they thank and re-thank their mentor. This is an mmppi.

I will attack “7 Street Smart Ways to Get a Mentor” by listing out the normal loser way and then the counterintuitive method. Afterwards, I’ll try to reveal the justification for why the street smart way works.